Come June 17, Google are looking to finish their VP9 video codec. From there, the Mountain View-based company will use their next-generation compression technology in both Chrome and YouTube. Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the WebM Project, said in a blog post:

Last week, we hosted over 100 guests at a summit meeting for VP9, the WebM Project's next-generation open video codec. We were particularly happy to welcome our friends from YouTube, who spoke about their plans to support VP9 once support lands in Chrome.

What is the WebM project? It is Google's project for freeing Web video from royalty constraints, with the WebM technology combining VP8 with the Vorbis audio codec. VP9 transmits video much more efficiently than the VP8 codec, and will be a huge milestone for Google and potential Web-video allies like Mozilla who hope to see royalty-free video compression technology spread across the Internet.